EATING ANIMALS BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

“...omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do”

“...someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning”

” the average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. Shrimp account fot only 2 percent of global seafood weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend to not think about this because we tend to not know it”

” For every ten tuna, shars and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left”

“Sentimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often, those who express concern about (or even an interest in) the conditions in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But it’s worth taking a step back to ask who is the a sentimentalist and who is the realist”

“today two companies own three-fourths of the genetics for all broiler chickens on the planet”

“not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly. They can’t even have sex. Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range or anything”

“the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with “broths” and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste”

“The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory farm in America’s most hog-factory-rich state, North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout the Americas”

“a pandemic is “not only inevitable, but overdue.”“

“Four companies now produce 60 percent of hogs in America”

“American frmers are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population”

“Without much room to move, the animals burn fewer calories and get fatter on less feed”

“a barrage of antibiotics, hormones, and other pharmaceuticals in the animals’ feed will keep most of them alive until slaughter despite conditions”

“For corporations like smithfield, it is a cost-benefit analysis: paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system”

“one ciolation might be an accident. even ten violations might. Seven thousand violations is a plan. smithfield was fined $12.6 million, which at first sounds like a victory against the factory farm. At the time, $12.6 million was the largest civil penalty pollution fine in US history, but this is pathetically small amount to a company that now grosses $12.6 milion every ten hours”